Pirate Book Club: The Invisible Hook

Hey all,

This month I'm choosing The Invisible Hook for the perusal of the Pirate Book Club, which I'm also more or less initiating right now. I'll review the book at the end of the month and want to hear what any and all of you think about it and its ideas.

So enjoy this romp into the economic implications of historical buccaneers in their own context and lets think about how they influence our own.

The Invisible Hook is an excellent book by one of the most creative young economists around.
(Steven D. Levitt Freakonomics blog )

A brisk, clever new book, The Invisible Hook, by Peter T. Leeson, an economist who claims to have owned a pirate skull ring as a child and to have had supply-and-demand curves tattooed on his right biceps when he was seventeen, offers a different approach. Rather than directly challenging pirates' leftist credentials, Leeson says that their apparent espousal of liberty, equality, and fraternity derived not from idealism but from a desire for profit.

(Caleb Crain New Yorker )